Many organizations, such as commercial organizations, financial institutions, government agencies or public safety organizations conduct numerous interactions with customers, users, suppliers and the like on a daily basis. Many of these interactions are vocal, or at least comprise a vocal or audio component, for example, voices of participants of a phone call or the audio portion of a video or face-to-face interaction.
Many organizations record some or all of the interactions, whether it is required by law or regulations, for quality assurance or quality management purposes, or for any other reason.
Once the interactions are recorded, the organization may want to extract as much information as possible from the interactions. A common usage for such recorded interactions relates to speech recognition and in particular to searching for particular words pronounced by either side of the interaction, such as product or service name, a competitor name, competing product name, or the like.
Searching for words can be performed by phonetic indexing of the interaction's audio signal and then searching the index for words. The search speed of a single indexed interaction is quite fast, but when dealing with large amounts of indexed interactions the accumulative search speed may be very slow in terms of user response time. There is thus a need in the art for a method and apparatus for enhanced phonetic indexing and search, in order to enhance the speed of speech search systems that are based phonetic indexing and search algorithms.